Instead of suggesting another framework for theorizing cosmopolitanism, I demonstrate how these strategies employed by bilingual writers can precede shifts in the individual and public imagination. My study focuses on narrative, thematic and linguistic strategies that the writers of my investigation employ to create a new linguistic persona in a world that is rethinking the very notion of linguistic and national identity. I treat cosmopolitanism as a deliberately chosen state and a laborious search for a new sense of home and identity in the multiplicity of texts. I argue that the unease with the status of bilingual writing derives largely from the Romantic model of mapping language to a nation. Existing literary and social practices inform and develop the notion theoretically and practically and illuminate new dimensions of cosmopolitanism as a constant and deep engagement with the other. I posit that sustained practice of bilingual writing charts a special space on the maps of national and world literature and presents an important dimension of emergent cosmopolitanism. It investigates why and to what effect language is appropriated by individual authors in different historical situations, and how a body of work produced by the same author in two languages articulates the relationship between the nation and the world. This dissertation addresses the phenomenon of literary bilingualism in the late 20th – early 21st centuries.
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